Something In My Veins Bloodier Than Blood
by lazarov
Summary: The first time she got her hands on morphine she felt like she was in middle school again, stealing glitter nail polish from the CVS.


"You're high," he says, right as soon as he's inside, and she bursts out laughing.

"Are you serious?" she spits. "You show up at my door to say that to me? Maybe you should take a closer look at my pupils."

"Funny." He follows her to the living room, examining her through sound, smell, taste. Her muscles aren't firing quite right and she stumbles a little - he moves quickly towards her, reaching out to try to steady her, but she evades him, strafing and ducking under his arms.

The humour drains from her voice as she drops onto her couch. "Yeah, hilarious, right? Leave."

He ignores her and doesn't move an inch, he just focuses hard: "I can hear it, you know. You're slurring your words and trying to hide it."

The shift in her heartbeat is so minuscule he barely catches but it's there: the speed increases just a smidge, going from a low, steady thump to a canter-like beat. She's nervous. Lying. "I had a beer when I got home, sue me."

"You're not going to lie to my face, are you? Really?"

"Fuck you."

"What the hell are you doing," he says, the question coming out differently than he thought it would in his head. Harsher. The chemical, whatever it is, seeps out of her skin and evaporates into the air and he can taste it, so heavy and strong that he gags a little. It settles as a bitter film onto his tongue, coating it, and his blood pressure rises. He wants to scream at her, and his voice breaks a little as he tells her, "You're so smart, Claire. You're so smart, and so strong, and - how could you be so stupid?"

* * *

 _How could you be so stupid?_

It's something her mother used to say to her, a catch-all admonishment she got smacked with every time she did something her mom didn't agree with.

After she stayed out late and came home smelling like cigarettes: _You're smarter than this._

In the Planned Parenthood waiting room, wishing with every fibre of her being that her mother would set down the gossip magazine and hold her hand: _I always thought you were smarter than this_.

A letter home from college, advising her she'd been placed on academic probation: _You're such a smart girl, Claire, and it kills me to see you throw it away_.

It was the cruelest, most effective way to punish her. Even as a kid, Claire could weather being called most things. Ugly, she could handle. Fat, that was… whatever. But stupid was different - stupid went against everything she knew she was, everything she'd ever known was essential to her inner self, the self she knew was more than her broken home and her ratty shoes, the self that she knew would grow into somebody _important_.

There were lots of other insults, but stupid was always the one that cut deep.

* * *

"You have no idea what you're talking about," she says, shaking her head. She laughs, low and raspy, as she runs her hands through her hair. Her hands don't shake: they're clumsy, but steady.

"You want the full list, Claire? Okay. Here it is: I can smell it on you, something heavy and toxic seeping out of your pores. It smells like bandaids and bitter aspirin and baby oil, and it took me a while to figure it out. The smell's a lot purer and more intense than street drugs, but it's the same thing." She stares straight ahead, mutely, as he continues: "I can hear the way your lungs are inflating and deflating; lazily, like they've been pumped so full of depressants they're too tired to keep going. _You_ sound too tired to keep going."

She doesn't respond.

"It's not heroin, is it," he says, quietly, half-statement-half-question. It doesn't smell like heroin, not quite, but almost; he can't parse it out, in his nose or on his tongue, but he knows it's _strong_.

"Morphine," she says. "Doctor-approved."

"Maybe by someone else's doctor."

"Yeah, maybe."

* * *

The first time she got her hands on morphine she felt like she was in middle school again, stealing glitter nail polish from the CVS. Just 4 mLs leftover from a trauma victim they'd had to pump full of painkillers til he stopped screaming bloody murder (half his face was ripped off from god-knows-what, a car accident or something, and she remembers standing over him and thinking that, if she squinted, she could see the reflection of her blue scrubs in the wet, glossy white of his skull). They'd only used half the bottle in his IV and she was supposed to waste it down the sink, regular procedure: two nurses witnessing, double-signed documentation, wham-bam easy-peasy.

But then her coworker got called away to help restrain a meth-head and, suddenly, she was alone with it and she didn't even give herself time to think about how fucking stupid she was being before pocketing it. She felt the weight of the little glass vial drop against her hip and her fingers tingled in that airy sort of way, like the moment the rollercoaster tips over the top of the climb and your stomach drops through the floor, then jumps into your throat, then drops back down to your feet again.

Stealing from work was miles more dangerous than buying off the street, and she changed tack real quick. Morphine ended up being easier to find than she originally thought: there are enough piece-of-shit kids in the city stealing it off their elderly grandpas and cancer-ridden moms that she never has a problem tracking it down (she feels bad, sort of, for contributing to the cycle of theft that she knows is leaving others in pain just so she can get some relief - that is, until she gets high and forgets, or until she feels the need burning under her skin and doesn't care).

So, now: she buys it off the street. Not often. Just often enough, with as little consideration or concern as picking up a bottle of wine on the way home so she can decompress in front of the TV. She figures it's easier for her to buy street drugs than for most people: everyone wants to sell to the pretty lady, the one with the big, doe eyes, the one with the edgy haircut and dirty mouth that prove she's not a cop.

* * *

"How long have you been using?"

" _Using_ ," she repeats, drawing air quotes next to her head with her fingers. "Are you trying to peg me as an addict, Matt Murdock?"

"Oh, right - so this is normal, healthy behaviour." He makes an annoyed sound. "You think everybody shoots up, just like popping an Advil?"

 _"Shoots up_! There you go again," she laughs. Slowly, she drags herself up from the couch and shuffles towards the kitchen, wrapping her sweater tighter around her body. Pulling mugs from the cupboard and pulling out her kettle, she tells him, evenly, over her shoulder: "I'm making tea, and I'll make you a cup too if you promise to leave by the time you either drink it or it goes cold. I don't have the energy for the circular back-and-forth bullshit I already know this conversation's gonna be." She flicks the kettle on and pauses, standing with her back to him and her hands braced on the counter. Softly, she says: "That was rude. I'm sorry. I know you're freaked out."

"I'm terrified," he says, honestly.

* * *

The high feels like being wrapped in a soft, warm blanket, swaddled so close and tight she can't fight herself loose: all she can do is let go and submit to the tide of the blur washing over her. It's unbelievably freeing - everything is still _there_ , her job, her family, her life, but the morphine lets her exist both with and without all of those things, all at the same time. Peaceful and blank and calm. The pain doesn't entirely go away, but it does become faraway and strange: someone else's pain, seen through warped glass with tired eyes.

She'd felt it, once before, when she was a kid: she broke her leg trying to jump down the last set of cement stairs leading up to the New York Public Library on her neighbour's skateboard and had eaten shit, real hard, at the bottom. Caught her leg funny, the rubber toe of her Converse sneaker catching on the grit, and her whole weight went down, hard, snapping her fibula and sending it straight through the skin of her shin.

My bone is outside when it should be inside? she remembers thinking, calmly, as the ambulance bounced and bumped along in traffic. No worries. Gas and morphine for the open fracture made her feel like she was ten feet above herself, aware but removed from her problems - the skateboard she'd abandoned at the steps of the Library, the school she'd be missing the next day, and later, her mom, hovering over the hospital bed and arguing over the bill with a harried nurse.

Twenty years later, at the first burning warmth up her arm, morphine reaching its tendrils towards her heart and bursting out, through her body, rushing through the entire network of veins and arteries, she'd flashed back to that moment: all alone, brave-faced in the back of an ambulance with her bone sticking out, escorted by a nice white lady who'd called 911, and she'd laughed.

Desperately, fiercely, she'd laughed until she had tears running down her face.

* * *

"Don't waste that tea, it's nice tea," she says, fingers tapping nervously against the edge of her jaw as she stares at him. Her mug is long-empty, guzzled down while it was still piping hot. "Drink up."

He drags his finger around the edge of his mug, round and round, but doesn't take a sip. It's still warm in his hands and he feels like he still has time. "You're going to stop, Claire. Tonight. No more morphine, no more drugs, period."

"Okay," she says flatly. Her fingers stop their tapping and they square off for a long moment.

"What?" He pauses. "Really?"

"No, asshole!" she hisses, grabbing him by the elbow and dragging him to the door. Tea sloshes onto the floor, soaking his socks and splashing up onto her sweatpants. "Get the fuck out of my house, already!"

His muscles tense under her hand and he freezes, leaning in and briefly resisting her before letting her yank the mug out of his hand and push him through the half-open door. "Wait," he says, weakly, "Claire, I just want us to talk about -"

She slams the door in his face.

He waits five minutes, counting off all three hundred seconds under his breath, before knocking again, quietly, so as not to wake the neighbours. He can hear her ignoring him on the other side of the door, slowly pacing back and forth in her kitchen. A minute later, he knocks again, just as softly, and she cracks the door open. She doesn't leave the chain on, though, and he takes it as a good sign.

"Please, Matt," she says, softly. "Just let it go, okay? Let's just forget it."

"I can't just," he says, "I can't just leave. Not like this."

"Come," she instructs, stepping aside to let him cross the threshold so that they don't have to whisper-fight at each other in her hall. He enters, gratefully, but she blocks him from moving past the entryway into the apartment. "We're not going to come to an agreement on this," she tells him. "You can't threaten me into stopping just because you don't like it."

He nods. "I know."

"This isn't, like… an issue. We don't have to make an issue out of this."

"Okay." He chews at the inside of his cheek and nods again. It's not okay, but he feels compelled to say whatever he needs to say as long as it will keep him in her company, breathing her in and listening to her heartbeat and knowing she's safe. Even for the moment. "I just need to know you'll be okay for tonight," he says. Just for tonight. Because he's already decided he'll spend the next few nights doing whatever he needs to do to keep morphine out of her hands: he's willing to sacrifice the broken fingers and jaws of as many low-level dealers as necessary in exchange for keeping her clean.

"I'm dry," she says, and when he furrows his brow at her she explains, "I used the last of what I had left - morphine, Actiq. There's nothing else in the house, Matt."

He's satisfied by her answer: she's telling the truth. "And you're not going to go out and get more tonight."

"No." She yawns and shakes her head. Another honest answer - it's so late, and they're both exhausted. He can sense the way their tired postures mirror one another, hunched over and curled up, like they're trying to shield themselves from the rest of the world; his arms are crossed, wrapped tight around his chest, and her hands are tucked in the pockets of her sweater (he can hear her fingernails picking, nervously, at a loose thread).

"So you'll be okay?" he asks again, stopping himself from taking a step closer to her. "Can I call you in the morning?"

Her skin is practically radiating with the smell of morphine, oozing its way out of her system, and he wants to wash her clean, to cleanse her from the impostor smell and return her to herself: Claire, whose skin always smells like latex gloves and coconut oil and the pineapple she likes to eat for breakfast, whose breathing is always steady and calm like the ocean.

"Yeah," she says, taking a shaky breath. "And I'm always okay."

That one is a lie, but he lets it slide.


End file.
